(Doe) Parties: When Can Politicians Combine Clientelistic and Programmatic Appeals?

“Do Everything” (DoE) Parties: When Can Politicians Combine Clientelistic and Programmatic Appeals? Matthew Singer University of Connecticut Herbert Kitschelt Duke University Paper Sketch prepared for presentation at the Workshop on Democratic Accountability Strategies. Duke University. Durham, May 18-19, 2011. This paper is based on a dataset collected under the auspices of the project “Political Accountability in Democratic Party Competition and Economic Governance,” implemented by a political science research group at Duke University (Principal Investigator: Herbert Kitschelt). Funding for the data collection was provided by the World Bank, Duke University, and the Chilean Science Foundation (research grant directed by Juan Pablo Luna and David Altman, Catholic University of Chile). Data analysis and conclusions of this paper are the sole responsibility of its author(s). 1 Introduction Models of how parties choose their linkage strategies usually posit that parties face a tradeoff between programmatic competition and clientelism (e.g. Dixit and Londregan 1996, Kitschelt 2000, Cox and McCubbins 2001, Keefer 2007, Lyne 2008). This theoretical modeling assumption has considerable plausibility, but direct evidence relies empirically on individual case studies or small-N comparisons. Yet a few studies have pointed out that parties may engage in product diversification and appeal to different constituencies with different linkage efforts (Magaloni et al 2009). The data for a large-scale global test of the assumption with observations across a broad spectrum of political parties have not been available until now. The Democratic Accountability project expert survey on political parties for the first time delivers the information to test the trade-off hypothesis on a global scale. Initial data analysis indeed suggests that the trade-off hypothesis is borne out. But as is the case almost invariably with large-N empirical investigations, the observations yield somewhat fuzzier and messier conclusions than theorists might have hoped for. Indeed, among the 506 parties in 88 countries included in the data collection there are rather substantial numbers of parties that defy the tradeoff hypothesis. At one extreme, there are parties that are strenuously making an effort to provide a variety of linkage mechanisms with their electoral constituencies. These “Do Everything” (DoE) parties display not only a capacity to reach out to electoral constituencies through vigorous clientelistic efforts to target material benefits to individuals and small groups of voters, but also a penchant to develop rather sharp programmatic policy contours, if elected to form a government. At the other extreme, there is a large subset of parties that, in the judgment of experts, are neither good at clientelistic outreach nor at programmatic appeal. What makes it possible for ‘Good for Nothing’ and “Do Everything” parties to appear and even rise to prominence? Among the two configurations of linkage outreach that defy the tradeoff hypothesis, DoE parties pose the greater and more interesting theoretical challenge. ‘Good for Nothing’ parties, by contrasts, tend to be electoral underperformers with small followings, sometimes even outright fringe parties. These parties typically tend to be of too recent origin to have been able to make a serious investment in party organization and linkage strategies. Or they are waning parties that have lost their way or found niches in which they play a small role in a highly fragmented system. In addition to these systematic effects, of course, a lot of parties identified as Do Nothing may end up in this category by virtue of measurement error only. In this paper sketch, we will thus take up the argument primarily for the more complicated and rewarding object of analysis, that of DoE parties. How can they push the envelope of democratic linkage building in so many different directions and sustain highly diversified electoral appeals. In the first section, we discuss the conditions that theoretically may give rise to DoE parties and the organizational and network choices that might sustain them. In the second section, we identify DoE parties in the Democratic Accountability Dataset and examine a range of complementary features that distinguish DoE parties from the rest of the field of political parties. We are here concerned with the organization of DoE parties and their use of social and associational networks. In the third and most tentative section, we probe into the 2 origins of DoEs. We realize that much more headway needs to be made than we will supply to come up with an elegantly simple, yet empirically powerful account of DoE parties. 1. Rise and Persistence of DoE Parties. Causal Conditions and Complementarities Effective clientelistic and programmatic mobilization involve distinct patterns of electoral demand, features of party organization, and governance structures to allocate benefits to partisan supporters. Trying to combine these under the umbrella of a single party brand imposes contradictory demands on party activists and leaders. These strains make it unlikely that parties actually can combine clientelistic and programmatic accountability. More specifically, there are at least four features where clientelistic and programmatic politics get in each other’s way: 1. Political Governance: It takes different kinds of laws and administrative governance structures to use the policy process to target policies through clientelist channels compared to programmatic ones. Clientelism relies on vague legislation with lots of discretion concerning resource allocation at the operational level of disbursement. Programmatic politics works through highly codified, universalistic conditional programs with clearly specified eligibility criteria. It is thus likely to be difficult to run both types of governance in the same party regime. 2. Distribution of Electoral Demand: The electorates to whom clientelism appeals may not only be different from those that prefer programmatic party competition, but directly at loggerheads with each other. Members of the constituencies with whom programmatic appeals resonate often despise voters craving for clientelistic appeals. This applies especially to more educated “middle class” voting blocs. “Progressive” movements against clientelism typically originate with urban middle class voters. 3. Party Resource Allocation: Clientelistic politics requires access to extraordinary quantities of tangible resources—either through private donors (vote-poor, resource-rich constituencies…) and/or through public funds made available after the capture of executive office. Many parties simply have no access to such resources (Shefter 1977). Even when parties have substantial resources, they may have to decide carefully whether to deploy them in clientelistic or programmatic fashion. Resource constraints may force parties to abandon clientelistic bids. At the margin, parties will often have to choose whether to invest in clientelistic or programmatic politics. 4. Party Organization: Clientelism and programmatic competition also place different demands on party organizational structures. Clientelism works best in party organizations based on encompassing informal networks of notables and external interest associations and with a highly centralized political staff that can funnel resources into the organization and on to external clients in an opaque, clandestine fashion. Programmatic parties, by contrast, can solve their credibility problems better by more or less extensive formal organization, combined with a leadership structure that imposes compliance with formal 3 transparency in the handling of resources and the recruitment of personnel and a modicum of institutionalized veto players as checks on the parties’ executive leaderships. Now, just because parties face tradeoffs in jointly pursuing clientelist and programmatic strategies at the same time does not imply that parties will not attempt to engage in both behaviors. Yet we generally expect that doing both to the fullest extent will be difficult. These mechanisms do suggest, however, ways in which parties may be able to combine both strategies. Parties may have access to specific historical legacies, economic groups within society, or extreme resources that allow them to overcome the constraints these tradeoffs assume exist. Thus we suggest a few counterfactuals that should make DoEs viable in defiance of the tradeoff postulate. The first two mechanisms (governance, electorates) speak to the causal origins of DoE parties, the latter two (finances and organizational structures) to the complementarities involved in setting up clientelistic and programmatic linkages. Causal Trajectories: Governance and Electorates The critical condition that may enable parties to compatibilize clientelistic and programmatic appeals has to do with economic development and the role of central state intervention. Let us use a simple stylized development model as the foil for our argument, distinguishing poor, medium income, and high income developed economies. In poor economies, economic activity is primarily organized at the local level and political players ask for few large club goods and collective goods only a high-capacity national state can provide. In this setting, parties are likely to coordinate around clientelistic accountability mechanisms, while public administration is shot through with patronage, capture by localized rent-seekers and more generally a pattern

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